REZVAN ZAHEDI

Rezvan Zahedi began her artistic practice at the age of 20 in Iran, photographing protest graffiti in the street denouncing discrimination against women, although she was unable to exhibit her work freely due to censorship and existing Islamic laws. In danger, she went into exile in France.

"For me, it's a question of reflecting on the way we impose reading grids on the outside world, which can be emancipating or, on the contrary, reductive and oppressive.

Rezvan's work, which combines photography and calligraphy, focuses on the female body, gender identities and the denunciation of related prejudices and discrimination. 

Graffiti tradition, committed art and photography are intertwined in his series of inscriptions - in the literal sense: schematic silhouettes, phrases or simple letters of the Persian alphabet - constituting so many interventions in intimate spaces belonging to the private sphere: abandoned apartment buildings, female bodies photographed in the studio and so on. 

The physical presence of the female body meets the materiality of writing in variations on the photographic work. 

For Rezvan Zahedi, it's a question of "bringing women out of censorship, denouncing the commodification of women and their bodies and the forced marriages of young women without their consent", of figuring and transforming silence, of giving voice to "the cry of women stifled by patriarchal culture", of speaking of beauty, femininity, love, emancipation and freedom.

Rezvan Zahedi was born in 1987 in Booshehr, Iran. She lives and works in Paris.

In 2023,  Vanity Fair magazine devoted a portrait to her.